Saturday, May 31, 2008

The Dummies

I did not, as predicted, have an easy day of excavating. I got there at around 6:30 and left 12 hours later. Digging the trench for the underground electrical conduit went fairly well. I ran into one boulder I couldn't get out and had to bend the conduits around it. We'll see what the electrician says about that when I see him there this morning.

The big story is the return of Earthworks at the eleventh hour. Four days ago I left a message for Lewis telling him he had until the end of the week to fix the road. I didn't think he'd show. So imagine my surprise when I look up from my excavating to see one of Lewis' henchmen walking my way. He and another guy had a couple loads of material they needed to dump and spread, and my car was in the way. So I walked up to the car with the guy and saw a dump truck but nothing else. "What are you going to spread it with?" I asked. The back door of the dump truck was the reply. I guess you can tilt the bed in the up position and the door drags behind and can be used to spread material. This didn't sound all that effective to me, but what do I know? So I drove my car down thinking I could get out once the material was there. A half hour later the guy returned. The loads had been dumped, but the road was so soft that the dump trucks couldn't do the work. He was coming to let me know because now I had a giant pile of rotten rock blocking my exit. I could get out; that was not the problem. So I asked the obvious, "When are you coming back to fix it?" And he says, "You'll have to call Lewis about that. I don't know when we'll be able to get a machine in here. We're just the dummies." This must be his stock answer in situations like this. He was a dummy and didn't seem to mind at all. Instead of blowing the whole thing off, Lewis had decided to do the absolute minimum and ended up making more of a mess in the process.